On 17 October, as fierce, out-of-season
bush fires erupted around Sydney and destroyed 200 houses after the
hottest year on record in Australia, Bandt tweeted that Australia would
experience more terrible climate impacts if newly-elected conservative
prime minister Tony Abbott got his way and abandoned the carbon pricing and renewable energy legislation enacted by the Labor government in 2010.

The previous day, Bandt had written
in The Guardian that: "Faced with the biggest ever threat to
Australia's way of life (bush fires), Tony Abbott is failing in the
first duty of a prime minister which is to protect the Australian
people." This struck a chord with many people and launched a long
overdue, but until now suppressed, public discussion about the
relationship between a hotter and more extreme climate and worsening
disasters.
A taboo had been broken, and amidst intense debate the dam wall broke.

Support
for this necessary conversation came from everywhere: climate action
advocacy groups, Labor backbenchers Kelvin Thompson and Doug Cameron,
senior political commentators, scientists and editorial writers. Lenore
Taylor observed
that "policymakers can no longer credibly look away." UN climate chief
Christiana Figueres told CNN that the Abbott government would pay a
heavy political and economic price for going backwards on climate
action.

For three years, Abbott has dominated the public climate
debate with a relentless negative campaign on Labor's carbon tax, a fig
leaf for his long-term climate denialism that "the science isn't
settled", is "highly contentious" and "not yet proven", that "it's
cooling" and "it hasn't warmed since 1998" and there's "no correlation
between carbon dioxide and temperature".

Now
accused of "failing to protect his people", Abbott refused to respond
for days, and instead headed off for duty with his local volunteer fire
brigade. But shouldn't the Prime Minister be leading the country, not
his local fire brigade, at a time of emergency? For the first time in
years, the prime minister was no longer on the front foot in the climate
policy discussion.

That climate change would load the dice in
favour of more intense disasters is well established. Fire researchers
in 2007 estimated that climate change would result in a two-to-fourfold
increase in extreme fire days. Between 1973-2010, Melbourne and Adelaide
recorded a 49% increases in their cumulative annual Forest Fire Danger
Index. And in February 2009 Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires killed
173 people, injured 414, destroyed 2,029 homes, and cost $4.4 billion in
damage. The fire index was an unprecedented 190 on a zero-to-100 scale.
Yet the possible impact of climate change on the days' events and
planning for the future was excluded from the subsequent royal
commission's terms of reference.

This week the NSW fire
commissioner spoke of "unparalleled conditions" and "a whole new ball
game". Conservative NSW premier Barry O'Farrell, when asked asked if
climate change made disastrous events such as the NSW fires more likely,
replied: ''Well, clearly, I think that's the science.''

Now the
taboo has been broken, what does in mean for the debate in Australia as
prime minister Abbott prepares to trash Labor's legislation?

Labor
and the climate advocacy movement made a strategic mistake in 2010 by
trying to sell the climate legislation as about "clean energy futures"
and "saying yes" without talking about how climate change would affect
people's lives. It was all about selling good news and not mentioning
bad news, selling an answer without elaborating the question. Public
support went down.

"Climate change is a choice between increasing
harm, or acting to restore safety."

Climate change is a choice between increasing
harm, or acting to restore safety. All the studies on health and safety
promotion — smoking, obesity, drink driving, HIV, workplace safety —
show same thing. Be honest about the problem and tell it like it is;
show a better alternative, the benefits of changing behaviour; and
finally demonstrate an efficacious path, the "you can do it" actions
that the person or society is empowered to take to move from fear to
success.

The debate which has erupted over extreme climate events
has important lessons for all those urging more, not less, action on
climate change. The story should be about people in Australia and not
distant places, about now and not just the distant future, about
connecting the dots between extreme events and global warming. It is a
story about record heat and bush fires, about how family and friends
will live in a hotter and more extreme world, about how a retreating
coastline will affect where we live and work, a story about health and
well-being, about increasing food and water insecurity, and the more
difficult life that children and grandchildren will face. This makes
climate action a values issue, the choice between increasing climate
harm and climate safety.

Australian per capita income is the
highest in the world, yet we are less happy than citizens in
austerity-riven Spain. Society's pace of change is creating new fears
and insecurities as people struggle to keep up. They fear for the future
in which their children will live. Hyper-consumption is being driven by
anxiety — fear of being left behind, of being "unfashionable" in the
broad meaning of the term — and an increasing sense of self-entitlement.

Sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman says that "human vulnerability and uncertainty is the
foundation of all political power". Abbott understood the politics of
fear in his tearing down of the Labor government.

Can he now be
stopped by constructing a narrative that recognises reasonable fear and
provides a clear path to climate safety, rather than increasing personal
and planetary insecurity? Can John Howard's and Tony Abbott's
"battlers" become safe-climate champions?